Lost
by dharmamonkey
Summary: Booth returns to his apartment two weeks after being shot at the Checkerbox and learns how his partner reacted to his faked death. Episode tag "Pain in the Heart."


**Lost**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:**T  
**Disclaimer: **Someone else owns Bones, but I am interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply.

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**A/N: **_My fellow writer and friend **threesquares** wrote a story, "Breaking Protocol" in which Brennan reveals that she slept in Booth's bed while he was "dead." I took that little morsel and, with her blessing, decided to run with it in a somewhat different direction. _

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She thought I didn't know, but I did.

I knew it the first night I came home after being away for two weeks. I'd "gone dark" while the FBI finished making arrangements for my fake-funeral so we could smoke out Mack Whitford, the leader of a white supremacist cell who'd spent six years on the run, successfully eluding arrest for money-laundering and wire fraud. I'd assembled the case against him during my rookie year with the FBI, and the threat of prosecution drove him underground. After sneaking into my own funeral as a member of my own U.S. Army honor guard, I'd nabbed the guy—that racist, would-be terrorist bastard—with a little help from my partner, who clocked him with the butt of his own pistol before hauling off and decking me.

The squints were all back in the lab trying to figure out whose jawbone was left on the platform by Gormogon and since I was more or less a fifth wheel, I decided to let them do their squinty little thing while I did something about my throbbing headache. I went home to grab a shower and take a nap.

After everything that had happened that day, I wasn't sure which I was looking forward to more—the shower or the nap—but it was a relief to finally be back in my own home, with my own, relatively clean bathroom and my own bed. It was a huge improvement over what I'd been living with while in hiding. Once I got out of the hospital (after my "death," the Bureau had gotten me transferred from GW to Bethesda Naval Hospital where I was treated under a fake name), I spent a week living in a roach-ridden efficiency apartment at scungy hotel on the outskirts of Baltimore. It was just plain nasty, but it enabled me to hide in plain sight despite the news stories that had been circulating in the Washington/Baltimore area press after my fake-death.

I went home and decided I needed three Advil and a nap more than I needed the shower. When I crawled into my own bed again for the first time in two weeks, I was hyperaware of the sensations of being home: the way my jersey-knit sheets felt against my skin, the sound of the noise outside my window as cars drove by on the wet street below, and the way my bedroom never really got completely dark because of the kink in one of the chintzy window blinds.

Perhaps the first tipoff should have been the fact that my bed was made—not perfectly made, à la US Army Infantry School or hotel-style, but definitely not the way I left it the morning I got shot. (I only make my bed right after I wash my sheets. Otherwise, I leave it the way it is when I woke up that morning.) I didn't think much of it when I walked in, because I knew the FBI had sent somebody to my place to get my things before I got released from Bethesda and squirreled away at that shithole hotel in Baltimore. I'd figured maybe the female tech they sent to my apartment to pack me a few things had a little OCD thing going on and couldn't help herself but to tidy up my messy bed.

But no.

When I crawled into bed, rolled over and tucked my nose against my pillow the way I always do, I knew something was different—something odd, something off. I squirmed a little against the sheets, then took a deep breath and closed my eyes. It took a few seconds for me to figure out what it was.

I could smell her.

_Her._

I could smell _her._

_Bones..._

It couldn't be, right?

But there it was—her scent. I knew it was hers because she'd been my partner for the last three years. When you work that closely with someone—spending all day in the car with her, walking around in the woods with her, chasing suspects with her, sitting in the interrogation room with her and looking over her shoulder on a hot and humid summer afternoon while she pokes around a rotting pile of bones, and sitting on her sofa after a long day in the field to eat Thai takeout—well, you get to know what someone smells like. And my pillow smelled like _her_. My sheets smelled like _her._ At first, I thought I was going crazy—maybe suffering some weird ass side-effect from the anti-inflammatory whatever-the-fuck drug they gave me for my gunshot wound, or maybe still a little off after getting my bell rung real good when Bones slugged me that morning at my fake-funeral—so I rolled over and reached for my other pillow.

Same thing.

I'd recognize that smell of hers anywhere, the sort of gingery-sweet smell of her shampoo mixed with the thicker, muskier smell of her sweat, and since I'd spent all of fifteen minutes with her that morning since getting shot two weeks before, as weird as it sounded I knew instantly that there was only one way her smell got all over my sheets.

She'd slept in my bed.

_She_ had actually slept in_ my_ bed.

The idea of it sent me reeling.

I knew she'd thought I was dead. I knew that, somehow the fuck or other, even though she was right there at the top of the list of people who was supposed to be told that I was _not_ actually dead (along with Pops, Jared and Rebecca), nobody had ever told her. For two weeks she thought I'd died, and I knew from her anger at seeing me fighting with Whitford at my fake graveside service, the way she'd slugged me after clocking Whitford in the jaw, and her snippiness at the lab afterwards that she'd been upset by the idea of losing me, despite the fact that Cam told me on the ride back to the Jeffersonian that Angela had basically had to drag Bones off the platform to go to my funeral. But I knew that something had happened inside of her, something unspoken but powerful enough to compel her to come to my apartment after my (apparent) death and sleep in my bed, on my wrinkled, unwashed sheets and lay her head down on my drooled-on pillow.

_She slept in my bed..._

My heart was racing and my thoughts were going a million miles an hour, and despite the three Advil I'd popped a little while earlier, my head was pounding like a jackhammer. I couldn't sleep. The thought of her going through all that, and that I wasn't able to keep her from having to go through all that, made me ill. I literally wanted to throw up.

_Oh, Bones..._

I climbed out of bed, wriggled out of my boxers and stumbled into the bathroom, and turned the water on as hot as I could stand it. As the tub was filling up, I went out into the other room, fetched my Steelers beer hat out of the hall closet, a couple of beers from the fridge (beer and a carton of two-week old milk was all I had left in there at that point) and a cigar from the box on top of my stereo. I lit the cigar, gave it a few satisfying puffs and held it between my teeth as I slid the cans of beer into the little holsters on the side of my beer hat (pausing briefly to wonder if I'd cleaned out the little polyurethane tube after the last time I used it), then, with a cigar in one hand, my Green Lantern #59 in the other, and two tallboys on my head, wandered back into the bathroom and turned off the water.

_She slept in my bed..._

What was I supposed to do with that, knowing that? A part of me felt a warm, tingly feeling knowing that she felt close enough to me to do that, and that she missed me enough, maybe, that it made her feel better to sleep in my bed. I wondered if she could smell _me _on my sheets, and if smelling me made her feel better. _What if it had? _I asked myself. _What does that mean? _But another part of my felt a little sick to imagine how it must have affected her, my ultra-logical partner, to make her do something like that.

I sighed and shook my head as if I could shake all those thoughts out of my head. It didn't work. I was just going to drown them out so I didn't have to think about them anymore. I put on my favorite Social Distortion record, turned the volume up to 9 and set the needle in the groove.

But I couldn't stop thinking about it. Or _her_.

_She slept in my bed..._

I didn't know what to think about that, or to do about it. _Do I say something to her? _I asked myself. _Or do I just carry on and pretend I don't know? _I sighed and slowly sank into the water of the tub. It was hot, almost too hot, and I sucked in a sharp breath and winced as I took a few seconds to get used to the temperature before reaching for my Green Lantern comic. _Jesus, Bones. _I didn't know what to do—what to say or to think. So I decided not to say anything, and I sat in that tub, drinking my beer and reading about how Pieface, Hal Jordan's mechanic, figures out that Hal and the Green Lantern are one and the same, trying not to think about her. I didn't want to think anymore about her laying there, curled up in my bed, between my sheets, staring out my bedroom window at the glow of the streetlight below my window.

I didn't want to think at all.

A few minutes went by—not too many because the A side of the record was still playing—when I heard the pocket door of my bathroom slide open and my partner, the one I'd slid into the bathtub to avoid thinking about, come barging into my bathroom.

"I need to talk to you," she said as she walked right up to the tub and stared down at me.

"What the hell, Bones?" I gulped, my pleasant beer buzz tumbling into a lightheaded feeling as I realized that she'd invaded my home, again. It was in that instant—sitting there naked in my tub holding a half-smoked Cuban and my treasured 1968 Green Lantern comic in my hand as I saw the anger shimmering in her eyes—that I made my decision.

We talked about her not knowing I wasn't dead, and why she wasn't told. But I never said a word about what I knew about what she'd done while I was dead-but-not-really.

I don't even really know why. I just couldn't. So I didn't.

The second I heard my apartment door slam shut behind her, I pulled the stopper on my tub and got up, the lukewarm water rolling off of me in sheets as I walked into my bedroom without even grabbing a towel to dry off.

I stripped the bed. I rolled the sheets, pillowcases and the duvet cover into a tight ball and carried them, dripping and leaving wet footprints on my hardwood floor every step of the way, to my washing machine and turned the temperature dial all the way to "HOT."

I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep a wink so long as I could even imagine smelling her on my sheets.

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**A/N: **_I have no idea where that came from, but it came from somewhere, and I decided to share._

_Let me know what you thought of it. Please consider leaving a review._


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